Model: For my 8th grade Outliers unit, Who is an outlier in your family? I plan to incorporate a variety of assessments. A teacher constructed baseline assessment might be used initially to ask students for their definition of an outlier. Does it deviate or conform to Gladwell’s? Can they justify why their definition qualifies as an apt definition of the term? To what extent does each student comprehend the concept of an outlier post reading?
The final exhibition of this unit will be a multi-genre piece that includes a transcribed interview, a written narrative about the subject, which includes a rationale about why the subject is an “outlier,” a copy-change poem about the subject, art/photography to help characterize the subject, and a technological component.
These final exhibitions will be shared with the entire 8th grade class and the school community. Because this is an authentic assessment, I will provide a negotiated, class constructed rubric for the final exhibition. In addition, I will provide a checklist for each element included in the final exhibition. This checklist will inform what I include in the direct instruction I provide in each lesson about each of the requirements. For example, one lesson will focus on how to construct interview questions and conduct an interview. I will require students to formulate questions that include both open-ended discussion type questions (which they have learned in their literature studies) and questions that begin with statements of fact about the subject, and therefore require a tight focus and deep research prior to the interview. A student’s performance on this final exhibition checklist will serve as my summative assessment of their understandings, knowledge, and skills. Formative assessments will occur at least twice per class. Students will respond to prompts in their journals about our work. For example, I might ask the question, According to Malcolm Gladwell, what is an outlier? I will read and comment on student responses, and in doing so, will be able to ascertain the extent to which they have comprehended the main ideas of the book and applied these ideas to their response. In addition, if I am teaching a specific skill, such as how to create a copy-change poem, I will have students practice this in class. My informal observations of each student working and the actual work they complete will inform my understanding of how much they comprehend the idea of copy-change, and can apply this to their own poem. “Exit tickets” will continue to be incorporated into our work. I will ask students to write to me during the last five minutes of each class: What is an idea or concept you learned today? What is a skill you started to pick up? What seemed hard or confusing about the work today? What do you want to know more about?
Lesson Plan: How to conduct an interview One assessment component of this lesson plan will be the interview checklist. Students have spent time reviewing and analyzing famous interviews of people who interest them: Bono, Greg Mortenson, etc. We will notice and take note of commonalities among the interviews: How do interviewers structure questions? How do the questions typically progress through the interview (from early life and struggle to triumph to projects the interviewee is working on at present), How much time does the interviewer spend talking as compared to the subject? What is the ratio (in a typical 6-8 minute interview) of questions to minutes? Students will take notes in response to these questions after watching each interview. I will ask students to read from their notes during class discussion, and will read their notes after class. Both check-ins qualify as formative assessments. Following our discussion, students will use class time to create their own interview questions for the “outlier” in their family. They will use a check-list generated from our discussion to guide their work. I will assess each student’s ability to apply their understanding of how a successful interview works to their interview questions. I consider this a summative assessment, because their work on these interview questions will reveal the extent to which they have developed the knowledge and skills required to create interview questions, and to transfer their understanding of what makes a successful interview to a new context: creating their own interview. In addition, I will conduct several formative assessments of other pieces: To what extent does each student offer information about the interview they watched? Who is able to find common threads between interviews (abstract thinking) and who is not quite? Who is able to analyze the presented “text” and who is not quite?
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Please read through this group's website and select three topics to write about in your "Discussion" section above. Respond to two other people.
Case study: New York Performance Standards Consortium Schools
This week you will review the consortium’s website: http://performanceassessment.org/performance/index.html.
Model: For my 8th grade Outliers unit, Who is an outlier in your family? I plan to incorporate a variety of assessments. A teacher constructed baseline assessment might be used initially to ask students for their definition of an outlier. Does it deviate or conform to Gladwell’s? Can they justify why their definition qualifies as an apt definition of the term? To what extent does each student comprehend the concept of an outlier post reading?
The final exhibition of this unit will be a multi-genre piece that includes a transcribed interview, a written narrative about the subject, which includes a rationale about why the subject is an “outlier,” a copy-change poem about the subject, art/photography to help characterize the subject, and a technological component.
These final exhibitions will be shared with the entire 8th grade class and the school community. Because this is an authentic assessment, I will provide a negotiated, class constructed rubric for the final exhibition. In addition, I will provide a checklist for each element included in the final exhibition. This checklist will inform what I include in the direct instruction I provide in each lesson about each of the requirements. For example, one lesson will focus on how to construct interview questions and conduct an interview. I will require students to formulate questions that include both open-ended discussion type questions (which they have learned in their literature studies) and questions that begin with statements of fact about the subject, and therefore require a tight focus and deep research prior to the interview. A student’s performance on this final exhibition checklist will serve as my summative assessment of their understandings, knowledge, and skills. Formative assessments will occur at least twice per class. Students will respond to prompts in their journals about our work. For example, I might ask the question, According to Malcolm Gladwell, what is an outlier? I will read and comment on student responses, and in doing so, will be able to ascertain the extent to which they have comprehended the main ideas of the book and applied these ideas to their response. In addition, if I am teaching a specific skill, such as how to create a copy-change poem, I will have students practice this in class. My informal observations of each student working and the actual work they complete will inform my understanding of how much they comprehend the idea of copy-change, and can apply this to their own poem. “Exit tickets” will continue to be incorporated into our work. I will ask students to write to me during the last five minutes of each class: What is an idea or concept you learned today? What is a skill you started to pick up? What seemed hard or confusing about the work today? What do you want to know more about?
Lesson Plan: How to conduct an interview
One assessment component of this lesson plan will be the interview checklist. Students have spent time reviewing and analyzing famous interviews of people who interest them: Bono, Greg Mortenson, etc. We will notice and take note of commonalities among the interviews: How do interviewers structure questions? How do the questions typically progress through the interview (from early life and struggle to triumph to projects the interviewee is working on at present), How much time does the interviewer spend talking as compared to the subject? What is the ratio (in a typical 6-8 minute interview) of questions to minutes? Students will take notes in response to these questions after watching each interview. I will ask students to read from their notes during class discussion, and will read their notes after class. Both check-ins qualify as formative assessments. Following our discussion, students will use class time to create their own interview questions for the “outlier” in their family. They will use a check-list generated from our discussion to guide their work. I will assess each student’s ability to apply their understanding of how a successful interview works to their interview questions. I consider this a summative assessment, because their work on these interview questions will reveal the extent to which they have developed the knowledge and skills required to create interview questions, and to transfer their understanding of what makes a successful interview to a new context: creating their own interview. In addition, I will conduct several formative assessments of other pieces: To what extent does each student offer information about the interview they watched? Who is able to find common threads between interviews (abstract thinking) and who is not quite? Who is able to analyze the presented “text” and who is not quite?